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Saturday, 15 May 2010

The Mighty Donald Blake?

If you look up Thor on IMDB, you'll see that Chris Hemsworth is playing both Thor and his mortal alter ego, Dr. Donald Blake (*Note*: IMDB contained user-generated content so can change). I just can't imagine how this could work. Odin, the ruler of the Norse gods of Asgard, exciles his arrogant son, Thor - the god of thunder- , to Earth to teach him humility and the meaning of heroism. In the comics, Thor arrived on Earth, without any memory of himself, in the body of Donald Blake. Thor, the Mighty Thor that is, and Donald Blake, a crippled puny human.
Donald Blake and Thor exist as a duality but neither knew of the other's existence until Blake discovered Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, and summoned Thor's physical form and memories.

The purpose of being put into the body of a partially disabled man is to teach Thor humility but I never really felt that it worked. In the Ultimate Marvel series, the writers (Mark Miller and Brian Hitch) decided to completely remove Donald Blake as a character, preferring to have Thor around all the time. This led to an enjoyable "god of thunder or schizophrenic mutant" mystery to Thor that wasn't resolved until the end of Ultimates 1. I hope IMDB's wrong and Blake's not in Thor as it would just be too complicated with everything else to introduce and you'd end up with something like Ang Lee's Hulk in which the title character doesn't appear until about the last 5 minutes of the film. If IMDB are right, there is either going to be some pretty weak Clark Kent -esque disguise or some amazing de-bulking CGI a la Sam Worthington's legs in Avatar. If Chris Hemsworth is playing Donald Blake, let's hope it's something like the latter as Thor is already enough of a riff on Superman without him putting on a pair of specs!